Last week, in my exploration of the goddess Iris, I wrote about Alice Oswald’s beautiful Hymn to Iris. It put me in mind of a conversation I had with a friend the other day about oral poetry and what it might have sounded like. Both of us were trying to imagine how Homeric poetry, like the Iliad and Odyssey, which was originally sung to music, might have sounded to their original audiences. We even managed to find one attempt to recreate a Homeric performance, which you can listen to here.

Well, my first reaction was that something like that would put me to sleep pretty quickly. How on earth would an audience have been able to listen to something that repetitive for hours on end? But in the Odyssey, in book 8 when Odysseus is visiting the court of King Alcinous in Phaeacia and hears the tales told by Demodocus the bard, the audience is described as being completely entranced by his stories. Odysseus praises the bard as the best of all men; later, he even bursts into tears at Demodocus’ moving rendition of the Trojan War. And on Michael Wood’s documentary, In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, modern oral poets are shown on video footage playing to rooms packed full of people listening in enraptured silence. So what’s the secret to oral poetry? Was it really as good as Homer tells us? Was it just a subtle advertisement from a master of his craft, trying to sell the experience to a few more clients? Or are we numbed to the enchanting effects of poetry in the modern world, with so much information available to us so fast — infinite websites, high-definition films, and endless music and video footage available at the click of a mouse?

Actually, I don’t think so. Thinking back to Alice Oswald’s Hymn to Iris, I was reminded of the way I first came into contact with her poetry. She came to visit Yale, where I’m currently studying as a PhD student, to give a recitation of her poem, Memorial. It’s described as ‘an excavation of the Iliad’, and I’d been told it was a compilation of all the lists of the dead in the Iliad. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to listen to a long list of dead people. Moreover, it was going to be over an hour long. How would I ever be able to keep my attention from wandering that long? But I went anyway, mostly out of a sense of duty and a vague feeling that, as I’m interested in classical reception, I should probably show up.

What happened totally took my breath away. Alice Oswald began with her opening invocation to Iris, which instantly captured me. I mean, starting with a hymn to a classical god? That’s pretty cool. She then proceeded to the poem itself. She had a mesmerising, lilting voice and piercing blue eyes that seemed to stare at me as I listened. Yes, that’s right – she looked at us the whole time. No looking down at the page, fumbling with notes, speaking into her chest. She’d memorised the entire poem by heart. Her head was up, she was looking at us and, it seemed, talking directly to me. The list of dead and dying heroes became, not a dull roll-call of men who had died thousands of years ago. These heroes mattered to her. You had to listen. It felt like a conversation – not a lecture. For over an hour her audience was spellbound, I couldn’t stop listening. It wasn’t just that the descriptions of the dead were beautifully done – similes that echoed Homer and yet were hollowly modern. It was the delivery, the sheer feat of memory and the way she delivered the poem to us, like a gift, a personal offering to each one of us.

So maybe that’s the secret to oral poetry, then. Perhaps the problem with listening to an extract of a person performing Homer online, through an mp3 player, in a foreign language that was spoken two thousand years ago, is that oral poetry requires an engagement, a relationship between the performer and the audience. It requires the awesome feat of memory that is needed to remember – and deliver – an hours-long poem, and the contract that that creates with the audience to listen and respond. It requires poetry that you can understand and engage with, and the intimacy of watching its creation – right in front of you.

So you never know – maybe Homeric poetry really was as good as Homer makes it out to be, after all.

Given that The Iris Project is named after the beautiful goddess Iris, I thought I’d do a bit of digging this week and see what I could uncover about her. You probably already knew that Iris was the goddess of the rainbow in ancient Greece. Maybe you also remember that she was one of the messengers for the gods on Olympus (Hermes was the other one). But did you know that there’s a statue of her right around the corner in London? Or that she gave her name to a hugely popular South Korean TV series? If not, read on – you might be surprised what you find out!

Let’s start with Iris’ name. What does it mean? Well, don’t feel bad if you don’t know – because not even the ancient Greeks could really decide! One definition said it came from the word iris, meaning ‘rainbow’. But another claimed that it actually came from the root eiro, meaning ‘I speak’ – because Iris was a messenger. Perhaps (and I’m inclined to think this is probably closer to the truth) it allowed for both meanings together, making Iris the messenger goddess who used the rainbow as her pathway to slide down to earth.

Iris was the daughter of two gods: a sea-god called Thaumas, and a cloud-nymph called Electra. The reason the Greeks gave her this lineage is simple but ingenious. The ancient Greeks believed that the clouds filled themselves up again with water by means of the rainbow, which drained water up from the sea and into the sky; so Iris, the rainbow goddess, naturally became the daughter of sea and clouds. A rather unexpected addition to this happy family, however, are Iris’ sisters. They weren’t rain or hail, as you might expect. They were Harpies! These horrible creatures were half women, half birds, with huge wings and sharp talons. Their job was to steal people away and torture them on their way to the Underworld with cruel punishments. Iris must have had quite a hard time growing up with them for sisters!

And yet Iris might have sometimes needed to ask her sisters for directions to the Underworld; because she had another job to keep her busy, alongside her messenger duties. This was to bring sacred water from the river Styx in Hades for the gods on Olympus to swear oaths on. That’s why you often see her in vase paintings carrying a jug full of water. But Iris doesn’t just appear in vase paintings. There is also a statue of her – in London! In one of the most famous of the British Museum’s galleries, where the beautiful sculptures of the Parthenon are displayed, you can find a gorgeous depiction of Iris, just about to spring off in flight. The Parthenon was a victory monument built on the Athenian acropolis around 440 BCE, and had two pediments, one on each end, each of them filled with statues. The west pediment told the story of Athena and Poseidon fighting to be the patron deity of Athens, and it’s here that we see Iris, to Poseidon’s left, just about to fly off with the news of Athena’s victory. It’s a beautiful statue, even without the large wings that would have spread out behind her. Iris’ robes whip around her body and fly back in the wind as she leaps into action. Her legs spring forward, and we can easily imagine her jumping off onto her rainbow road towards the earth.

So that’s Iris in the past, then; but what about Iris now? Over two thousand years after the sculpture of Iris darting from the Parthenon was created, we still remember Iris – in some more obvious ways, and others that are harder to spot. Take the iris of the eye, for example. We all know that the coloured part of our eye is called the iris – but did you ever think why? Well, it was named after the Greek word for rainbow, because its has so many beautiful different colours. And the iris flower was named for our goddess because of the huge range of different colours that the species displays. But there are some other, less obvious re-uses of Iris’ name. The South Korean espionage TV drama called Iris (IRIS is the code-name for a secret agency) is one example. Then there’s the Android app called Iris, a competitor to Apple’s Siri (which, by the way, is a Norwegian word for a beautiful woman – and is ‘iris’ spelled backwards!) Iris appears as a character in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. She’s the subject of a beautiful poem by Alice Oswald. And, of course, last but not least – she gave her name to The Iris Project.

So Iris is a fascinating goddess. She’s able to bridge the gap between heaven and earth as a messenger from the gods to the mortals. She can be found anywhere from a vase painting to a statue, a piece of anatomy to an Android app. She’s able to move effortlessly between the past and the present, bringing us closer to the people of the ancient world and informing and colouring ours. And that, I think, is why she’s still so appealing to us today.

When I was asked to write a blog for Iris Online about all things classical my first thought was: how on earth, from all the hundreds of thousands of facts and artefacts and stories we have about the Classical world, am I meant to choose what to write about? And so, after many scrapped drafts and a quick bike ride to my local museum for inspiration, I thought I’d simply start by sharing with you what I’m passionate about: the women of the ancient world. Some of you already know that I’ve recently written a historical-fiction novel, telling the story of the Trojan War from the perspectives of two of the women who loved, lived and lost during one of the most famous battles of all time. I want to share with you why I believe it’s so important to keep thinking about and interpreting the women of the ancient world, and why they still matter today. Contrary to everything we’re told in history books, classical women were smart, they were sexy, and they definitely knew their own minds. Remembering that, and starting to see the world through their eyes, opens up a very different vista onto the past than any you might have seen before – and in turn, makes us see our world with new eyes. So here are a few of my heroines and their stories.

THE WAR HERO

My first heroine has to be Briseis, one of the main characters who appears in my novel. She comes up in the first book of Homer’s Iliad, one of the most famous works of Ancient Greek literature, as Achilles’ war-prize. In the famous quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon that opens the poem, Agamemnon forces Achilles to hand over his prize, the captive slave Briseis. Achilles responds by leaving the war in a fury of rage. The story of the Iliad is set – and it’s all because of Briseis.

She might be an unusual choice for my first heroine – she’s a fictional character, after all – but I believe she exemplifies one crucial reason why women of the ancient world need to be remembered: as victims of war. There’s actually a backstory to Briseis’ character hidden between the lines of the Iliad that dramatically changes the way we think about her. Homer mentions that, before she was captured by Achilles, she was a princess in one of the cities around Troy and was married to a nobleman called Mynes. During the sack of the cities around Troy, her three brothers and her husband were all killed by Achilles. It was only then that she was taken as Achilles’ prize to the Greek camp.

Briseis’ story is vitally important, I believe, because it gives us an alternative viewpoint on the legend of the Trojan War. It’s a very different world from Achilles’, with his debates on honour and glory. To see the Trojan myth through the eyes of a woman who has lost everything is to truly understand what’s at stake in a war. And that matters as much now as it ever did.

THE POET OF LOVE

One of the things we often come across in Classics is that writers are almost always male, and that, by and large, they usually tell stories about men. But Sappho is the exception. Sappho was a female poet who lived on the island of Lesbos in around 600 BCE. And although we only have fragments of her poetry, they are enough to give us an idea of the extraordinary nature of her work.

With Sappho, we start to come across a very different voice from that of her predecessor, Homer – and one that is fully capable of holding up its own against him. There’s a fantastic poem (16) where she reacts and responds to Homer’s epic, and replaces it with some of her own concerns. Sappho opens with these words:

There are some who like war: cavalry, infantry, or navy, they'll say it's the most stunning sight on earth they've ever seen. I say that it's what- ever someone loves.

(My translation)

This is a radical shift. Before Sappho, the only proper subject of literature was war. But Sappho turns it around. As Helen loved Paris and crossed the world to be with him, she goes on to say in the rest of the poem, so she is in love with Anactoria. The message is clear. For Sappho, the Trojan War isn’t about Achilles, as we saw above with Homer. It’s about the passion of Helen and Paris, and Sappho’s longing for her own lover. In other words, for Sappho, as for Briseis, the Trojan War can be and is a woman’s story.

So Sappho is essential in that, like Briseis, she gives us a different narrative of the ancient world; but this time she does it with her own voice. For the first time, the woman’s tale is being told. Life in the ancient world is revealed as not just all about war and battle and politics and men – it’s also about love, and heartbreak, and women, and marriage. It is a breakthrough moment. For the first time in ancient literature, the female voice is speaking up.

THE POLITICIAN

After Sappho you might be forgiven for thinking that the world of women was all love and marriage and rainbows. Well, my next choice is Livia, and her life was a world away from Sappho’s lovestruck song-making on the Greek islands.

Now, I have to admit I’m biased in choosing Livia as my final heroine. She’s been a personal favourite of mine, ever since I first received I, Claudius for Christmas over ten years ago. But then, anyone who’s read Robert Graves’ sparkling portrait of Livia can’t help but love her for the shrewd politician and cutthroat villain he makes her out to be.

But what are the real facts about Livia? Born in 59 BC into the turbulent years of the late Roman Republic and the triumvirate of Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, Livia grew up at the heart of the Roman civil war. Originally married to a staunch Republican and with two children by him, she met a dashing young general, Octavian (later Augustus, the first Roman Emperor). Octavian apparently fell in love with her at first sight, divorced his own wife, Scribonia, and forced Livia’s husband to divorce her. The couple were immediately married. A few years later Octavian became Augustus, and Augustus became Emperor. Eventually, after Augustus’ death, Livia’s son by her first husband, Tiberius, would become the second Roman Emperor – and so the first to continue the hereditary monarchy that would last for the next 400 years.

Whatever the facts really were, Livia clearly wielded a huge influence over one of the greatest political figures of the ancient world and helped to forge the Roman Empire out of the ashes of the Republic. Her determination to get her son into power (even if she didn’t use all the means Robert Graves attributes to her) ensured the continuation of the monarchy and shaped the Roman Empire for hundreds of years to come.

So here are our three women: the war hero, the poet of love, and the politician — three extraordinary and passionate women, who were quite capable of making a splash on the historical record. Until a few years ago, however, the traditional view ran that the women of the ancient world were hidden in the background, without much ability to do anything and certainly no opportunity to affect events around them. Thankfully, that point of view is now changing. Since the publication of Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves in 1975, the study of ancient women has burst into life. Women like Briseis, Sappho and Livia are now making their way into the school curriculum. Their stories are being examined in scholarship, rediscovered in fiction, presented in documentaries. The women of the ancient world are, at last, reclaiming their place in history.